The Obsidian Blade (15 page)

Could he follow them? Would it do any good? Or would it be like jumping into a volcano? He would take a bullet to save Tucker — to save any kid. But this thing — this disk — it terrified him to the depths of his soul.

With that realization there came a faint hissing sound; the fuzzy surface of the disk turned clear, then disappeared completely. Kosh reached out with his hand, but felt nothing.

He sat down on the ridge with his back against the chimney and waited there for a very long time. The disk did not reappear.

T
UCKER LANDED ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES ON A HARD
stone surface. The stone was warm, like a sun-baked sidewalk, but this was no sidewalk — the surface was sandpaper rough, made of close-fitting limestone blocks.

He sat back on his knees. It was night. He was looking down a steep, stepped wall of stone blocks, wider at the bottom than at the top. To either side of him, burning torches were affixed to ten-foot-tall poles set into the top step. The disk from which he had fallen floated in the air just above him, so close that he could have reached out and touched it.

Far below, at the base of the stepped wall, thousands of people crowded an enormous plaza, torchlight reflecting off their upturned faces. He felt rather than heard their voices, a thrumming in the thick, humid air.

Other voices, close and angry, came from behind him. Tucker turned. He was on the edge of a stone platform about thirty feet across. Four more disks, just like the one he had fallen from, hovered over the other sides of the platform, each of them flanked by a pair of tall torches. At the center of the platform was a waist-high block of black stone. An altar? A pale-haired girl was standing upon it — Lahlia! But she looked younger, her hair was shorter, and she had on the same silvery shift she had worn the day she had arrived in Hopewell. Her feet were bare.

A flash of gray caught his eye. Bounce leaped from the platform onto the altar and into Lahlia’s arms. The two of them stared down at Tucker — Lahlia in wide-eyed astonishment, as if she had never seen him before, while Bounce watched him with slitted, knowing yellow eyes, his tail twitching.

On the other side of the altar, near the far edge of the platform, three men in hooded yellow robes were crowded together, bent over something. They had their backs to him and had not seen him arrive. Were these the priests Lahlia had mentioned? Two of them had their hoods up; the third had his hood down, revealing a shaven scalp and a scraggly beard. They were speaking in a strange language.

Tucker couldn’t see what it was they were looking at — the stone altar blocked his view. Lahlia, hugging her cat to her chest, looked terrified. Tucker edged to his left to see what had the priests’ attention. A figure was sprawled limply at the edge of the platform, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.

“Dad!” He cried out without thinking.

The priests looked up, startled.

Forgetting Lahlia’s warnings about the priests, Tucker dashed across the platform to his father. The Reverend Feye’s eyes were half-closed and unfocused. Tucker shook him.

“Dad! Wake up!”

One of the priests grabbed Tucker by his collar. Tucker twisted free and backed away.

“What did you do to him?” he shouted.

The bearded priest, a dark-eyed man with harsh, hawklike features, answered him with a string of nonsense words that sounded like a mixture of Chinese and Spanish.

“Speak English!” Tucker said. “I can’t understand you.”

The priest raised his black eyebrows.
“¿Inglés?”
he said, pointing a short black baton at Tucker.

Tucker backed away. The bearded priest lunged toward him, jabbing the baton at him. Tucker dodged the thrust, looking around frantically. He kept backing away from the priest, following the edge of the platform. Each of the sides ended in a long, widening series of steps down to the crowded plaza — he realized that he was on top of an enormous, five-sided pyramid. Other than jumping into one of the disks, the only way off was to climb down the sides, but the pyramid was completely surrounded by the crowd of people.

The priests were coming at him from both sides. Tucker grasped one of the torch poles, pulled it free, and swung it at the nearest one. The priest jumped back, tripped, and fell over the edge, screaming as he tumbled down the steep side of the pyramid. Tucker swung the torch back toward the other two priests, but before he could swing again, the bearded priest rushed in and chopped at the torch with his baton. The baton struck with an explosion of blue sparks; the torch separated from the pole and fell smoking to the platform.

The priest gestured with the baton and said something, again in the strange language. The other priest had circled the platform and was coming up behind Tucker. Tucker swung the broken pole from side to side, trying to keep them both at bay.

While the priests were focused on Tucker, Lahlia had climbed down from the altar and moved toward the far side of the platform, carrying Bounce. She stopped in front of the disk nearest Tucker’s unconscious father and looked back at Tucker and the two priests.

Bounce yowled.

The bearded priest looked back at her and shouted something. Lahlia shook her head and, with an expression that was both terrified and triumphant, stepped into the disk. The disk flashed orange, and she was gone.

The priest cried out in frustration, then turned back toward Tucker, his face contorted with anger. Tucker jabbed at him with the broken end of the torch pole. The priest knocked it aside contemptuously and touched the baton to Tucker’s hand. A jolt of pure pain rocketed up Tucker’s arm and exploded at the base of his skull. Every muscle in his body went slack, and he collapsed to the stone platform.

A hypnotic, almost subsonic murmur from the crowd below filled the air. Tucker could see and hear, but he could not move. The priests standing over him were speaking more gibberish. The bearded one gestured at Tucker’s father, a few yards away, and said something that sounded like
“Heid.”
Tucker could see the two priests drag his father across the platform. Each priest took an arm and a leg, lifted him, and threw him into one of the disks. Another orange flash, and his father was gone.

The priests returned to Tucker, dragged him to the altar, and set him roughly upon it. Unable to move his head, Tucker stared up into a star-pocked sky, in the midst of which hung a reddish orb.
A red moon?
Lahlia had once said something about a “blood moon.” The sky began to vibrate and rotate. It took several revolutions before Tucker realized that it was not the stars rotating, but the altar turning beneath him. The stone block was on a pivot, and the priests were turning it. He could hear their grunts of effort as they spun it faster and faster, like a flesh-and-stone version of spin the bottle. After a few more revolutions, the altar juddered to a stop.

He heard the deep voice of the bearded priest shout out a word:
“Bitte!”
Tucker was able to turn his head far enough to see the priest moving from one face of the pyramid to the next, stopping at each to call out to the murmuring crowd.

“Bitte!”

After the fifth call, the crowd fell into total silence.

The bearded priest walked up to Tucker and raised his right hand high over his head. Tucker saw the glint of torchlight on a shiny, black, wedge-shaped blade, and the strangely colored moon, and the harsh, angry features of the priest. The black blade flickered. He heard a grunt of effort and felt something slam into his chest. For a moment he thought he had only been punched, but when the priest withdrew the blade, it was followed by a bright red fountain of blood.

T
HE SKY WAS BLUE, THE TREES WERE THICK WITH GREEN
needles and yellow leaves, and an incredibly old woman was bending over Tucker. Her pale eyes, muted jade, searched his face anxiously. Her hair was the color of cigarette ash. He thought he had never seen anyone so ancient, but at the same time she looked familiar, like the way he imagined his own grandmother, whom he had never met.

The air smelled of pine needles, rotting leaves, and wood smoke.

“Trackenspor? Septan?
Deutsch?
” The old woman pointed a gnarled finger at her mouth. Behind her, a disk shimmered and pulsed.

Tucker tried to speak, but something was squeezing his chest, giving him barely enough slack to breathe. He moved his head from side to side, saying no to whatever the woman was asking.

“Français? Non?”
She held a knobby walking stick in her right hand.

Tucker shook his head. He remembered the blood, and being lifted from the altar, and then a familiar inside-out, falling moment. He understood that he had been thrown through a disk but remembered nothing after that until he opened his eyes and found this strange old woman mouthing unintelligible questions at him.

“¿Inglés?”
Her eyes widened; her pupils dilated. “English!” Her lips peeled back to reveal a collection of small, even teeth. It took Tucker a moment to recognize the expression as a smile.

“¿Cómo está usted?”

Tucker shook his head.

The old woman rapped herself on top of the head with her stick. “English, English! Too many tongues.” She walked around him, using her walking stick but not seeming to really need it. “Leg coverings, the name, the name . . .” She pointed her stick at his legs.
“Pantas? Genus?”

“Jeans,” Tucker managed to whisper.

“Jeans! And . . . and a
blouson
? Blouse? Prenumerary? Digital?”

Tucker shook his head helplessly. He felt weirdly disconnected from his body. In his head, he was terrified; his heart should be pounding, but his body felt relaxed. He sensed only a steady, calm rhythm from within his chest.

“Your heart has been damaged.” Her voice sounded more normal now. “The Lah Sept are efficient with their knives.” She rapped her stick against his chest. It made a dull clacking sound. Tucker lifted his head enough to see a convex metallic plate affixed to his chest.